In a short period of time, Hootsuite has become the dominating force on the social media monitoring platform of choice. It’s a glorious web/mobile application that handles Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress (and more) updates to multiple profiles. Half the battle of social media is understanding, the other half is managing it 🙂
(Disclaimer: I am in no way shape or form affiliated with Hootsuite or getting paid to share. This posts stems from years of managing multiple brands and needing to simplfy.)
Benefits
There are many ways to send Facebook posts to Twitter, Twitter to Facebook, WordPress to Facebook and Twitter, etc.  Hootsuite is a tool that allows you to send updates to all of these profiles and monitor the response—all at one click of a button.
Using Hootsuite, you can designate specific times to devote to social media instead of being distracted by it all of the time. In an hour a week you can pre-schedule updates for specific profiles, respond to other’s posts, and monitor all of your social media profiles. Hootsuite makes it easy for you to cut down on wasted time keeping up with it all.
Features
These are the features that I use regularly. You can check out a full list of features here.
1) Built in Owl.ly URL shortener to shorten and track URLs
2) Scheduled updates
3) Unified dashboard to monitor @mentions, retweets, direct messages, #hashtags
4) Forward messages to your team to respond to
5) Graphically pretty analytics and easy to understand data
6) Monitor Twitter search keywords
7) Monitor Twitter lists of favorite photographers
How to SignUp
Sign up is easy and quick. Click on the big ‘Sign Up Now’ button and choose Basic (FREE) or Pro ($5.99/month) registration. The majority of folks will do just fine with the free version. With just 5 questions, you have an account and can get started integrating your social networks to Hootsuite.
If you’re looking for a way to stay connected but do it efficiently and plan ahead with your social networking, Hootsuite is a free, fairly easy to use platform to centralize your posting and monitoring. Understanding Facebook and Twitter at a minimum is needed before you begin using Hootsuite.
Written by Wendy Roe
Wendy Roe has spent the last 10 years ingrained in all things web marketing – from design/development to search/social media. In May 2010, she decided to quit the corporate life and join forces with her husband, Byron Roe, to shoot full-time one of life’s ultimate highs – weddings. She now focuses on business development and being a second shooter for Bend, Oregon based wedding photographers, Byron Roe Photography.
Recently, she’s enjoyed speaking at WPPI Photographer’s Ignite and to west coast PUG groups consulting photographers on web marketing. She’s known as an interpreter, changing technical language into easy information. Above all, she’s an educator at heart and believes: “Web marketing and wedding photography are two passions that drive bringing the best out beauty and brands.”